“One problem endemic in the tech world is finding sales people that can connect you with the right customers,” she told BusinessCloud.

“If you ask any of the tech companies in Manchester if they’ve cracked the sales thing, if they’ve found a scalable solution for their sales people, they’ll all say ‘no’.”

Instead, Clark and her team decided to build and introduce “an army of bots” into the sales process.

“We built a bot that goes away and does the research that I used to be paying people good money for to be sat at a desk and be messing about on Google or LinkedIn,” she said.

“We just tell the bots to get on with it now. We tell them what we’re looking for and the sort of things we’re interested in, and they go away and identify them.

“They can start the initial conversation off and then it gets picked up by a human.”

Automation and bringing in machines to streamline processes is something that Clark believes will be vital to business success in future.

“Look at what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis – ask ‘does someone really need to do that, can we codify that?’” she said.

Clearly the approach has worked for Dream Agility. In less than two years, the Ramsbottom-based Google shopping platform has built a presence in Australia, Atlanta and France and aims to disrupt the £70 billion Google market.

“I was originally thinking about a £400m exit but the CTO of Barclays asked me ‘why £400m? Why not £1bn?’” she revealed.

“And I thought ‘my goodness, why have I restricted myself to £400m?’ If you can do £400m you can do £1bn. That’s the target.”

Dream Agility was included in BusinessCloud’s list of 101 tech start-up disrupters -read more